Thinking In Reverse

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Last night while enjoying my evening ritual of Youtube sleuthing I stumbled upon a video by Alex Hormozi. I would say the vast majority of my youtube consumption is photography related or architecture related. So imagine my surprise when the Youtube algorithm tossed me up “Reprogram your mind to be rich in 22 minutes….”. If I’m being honest, I don’t spend much time thinking about being rich. In fact, I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life sort of living the exact opposite of that thought process. But algorithms being algorithms the video had me interested. 

The first thing that struck me about Alex was his clearly evident IDGAF mentality, I mean the video is 22 minutes long and he has a black breathe right strip on his nose the entire time. But to be honest it worked for me. In the video which you can see here Alex gives 28 ways for you to stay poor, and then at the end he flips them and reverses them for 28 ways for you to be rich. While the video is great, and I highly recommend you checking it out, the thing that struck me most was the fact that I learned something new in the way a human brain works. 

At the beginning of the video, Alex spoke about his hero Charlie Munger and a talk he gave multiple times on how to live a miserable life. The reason Charlie frames it that way is because of his belief in inversion thinking, where you solve problems in reverse. Apparently, we are evolutionarily designed to find problems. Our brains are much better at finding problems than they are at finding solutions. So if we’re able to harness our brains evolutionarily designed ability to find problems, we can use that to find our solutions. The example Alex gives is if you want to have a good marriage rather than looking up ways to have a good marriage you look up ways to destroy your marriage and do the exact opposite of those ideas. This was super interesting to me because I started to think about how often I practiced this sort of mentality in my life and how I unknowingly and often solved my problems in reverse. 

One example I’ll use is this blog. I used to write on the internet back in the day for places like Elite Daily, Thought Catalog, and The Good Men Project to name a few. But sometime into that journey I got away from writing. It just stopped having the same impact for me. I couldn’t contribute anymore to those places without feeling like I was losing a piece of myself each time I put out an article, so I stopped. Fast forward to this month and I’m happily writing again. I took a wild detour to get here but I started asking myself the question of why I wasn’t writing anymore, and what I could do to start again. I found inspiration in the form of a friend I had on my podcast Jack Raines and voila, here I am writing this post here today. 

Another good example is my podcast, The Wrong Advice Podcast. A lot of people often ask me, “John how did you start your podcast?” My answer is usually the same, I looked up online the tools I needed for a podcast, i.e. software & microphone and started one. I got to the end of what I needed for my podcast and I just started going from there. The thought of the ways it could go right or wrong never once entered into my mind, it was just something I wanted to do so I did it. 

I think we often spend lots of times in our lives doubting our ability to do something because it innately seems hard. As I’ve gotten older in life I’ve spent a lot more time asking myself what else I can learn, what else I can do because to me that’s what life is about. Just because something like starting a podcast seems hard, doesn’t mean it actually is. We psyche ourselves out before we ever even get on the rollercoaster and I think it speaks to just how our brains are wired. I just learned we’re designed to see problems first instead of solutions and when you start framing that mindset to your everyday life you can see how you can put up barriers and walls for yourself. 

Ultimately for me, I’ve gotten to a place of comfort in who I am and what I’m doing with my life and because of that I’m busy knocking walls down and building things for myself everywhere. I hope you can learn a bit from my experience and others and stop being so hard on yourself and start doing more fun challenging things in your life.